It’s the end of the world as we know it … and I feel fine?

Dresden Codak pretty much takes the turn we were expecting … the end of the world. The current panel is ominously titled “Hob 25 — And That’s That.” (Link may be Not Safe For Work due to naked views of Kimiko’s butt and some boobage. I also expect this link to float to the top of one of my most clicked links on this site.) Of course, this being Dresden Codak, I fully expect the brave new world mentioned at the end of the strip to be some sort of magical fusion of man and machine. A transhumanist paradise (as alluded to two years ago in “Epilogue“).

So… does this remind anyone of Neon Genesis Evangelion? Not just how the end of the world is instigated by some cute girl who develops godlike powers. Or how everyone’s absorbed into a sort of entropy that gives birth to a new world (a theme that was also reiterated in Evangelion‘s close cousin in anime, RahXephon). How about how Dresden Codak, like Evangelion, started out a sort of a breezy saga with somewhat cerebral anecdotes into an oppresively serious storyline with cosmic aspirations?

Also, it’s kinda weird that this is the second major storyline in webcomics to touch on the end of the world. In March of this year, Minus concluded with everyone in the world still dead. It was played off as a pleasant thing, perhaps even better than life as a living person. Yet, like the similar ending at the end of Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle, I couldn’t shake the eerie feeling of melancholy.

EDIT: Argh. Stupid differences in date notation. I wend back to check that strip, and I just noticed they were using the day/month/year convention. Minus actually concluded its storyline in July.

Aw, man. You know what killed the joke for me? The fact that I knew someone survived in Minus and I couldn’t remember who it was. So I was wondering if you were being serious about Francisco Franco coming back to life.

It turned out I was wrong. The last living man on Earth was Larry Fine.

Dresden Codak went downhill ever since it tried to impose a serious storyline. The problem is that it took characters that had no personality whatsoever and suddenly expected us to care about them. Their lack of personality was fine when it was a quirky, nonsensical story, but you can’t just suddenly take personality-less characters and put them in a serious story and expect us to care about them. The plot is confusing and I don’t get it either, so I can’t care about the characters or the plot.

While Minus has the same problem as Dresden Codak in that the characters have no personality whatsoever, it stayed funny and lighthearted so it managed to work. If it had gone for Cerebus Syndrome, it would’ve ended up like Dresden Codak.

At least when Neon Genesis Evangelion went into being especially serious and dark, it had already set up the character’s personalities so we could care a certain degree about what happened to them, which Dresden Codak never did. I think Dresden Codak is kind of a lesson in how NOT to imitate Neon Genesis Evangelion.

I’ll cut my rant short here because I have a tendency to rant about how DC has gone downhill, but I honestly can’t bring myself to care if the world is ending in the series because I don’t care about the characters and I have no idea what’s even going on in the series.